Organized physical presentations of information have been known for many years. It is often desirable to preserve and transfer a physical representation of information from one person to another while maintaining a context with such a transfer.
One of the oldest kinds of presentations is a book. The creation of books was originally a manual operation, requiring much labor. Printing technologies were developed, resulting in an author's ability to distribute a presentation more widely. However, printed presentations have always suffered from the limitations of the printing process, and although printing technologies have advanced from printing presses to modern multi-color desktop printers, these technologies have generally been limited to the production of words and images on simple sheets of paper.
There are those for whom the uniformity of printing processes is undesirable in a presentation. One of the main reasons for this is that printed presentations lack a certain personal touch. One can add a handwritten note to a printed presentation, but some desire a mode of greater personal expression. This is often desired in a personal memento or record, such as in a family photo album or in a corporate history. To achieve this, persons have collected various elements expressing feelings or recording aspects of the events depicted. For example, it is known to press a leaf in the pages of a photo album at the location in which photographs are attached of a trip to view autumn leaves. It is also known for a person to save invitations and bits of decoration from an event, such as a corporate party or a wedding, and embed these into a presentation of these events.
Some have taken this a step further, and have sought to accent a presentation with a personal touch through the use of papers, stickers, labels, ribbons and other material attachable to a presentation. For example, one can obtain images related to live events, such as the birth of a child, which images might for example be “ABC” blocks, teddy bears and cradles. In other cases, it is desirable to frame or decorate photographs within a presentation, for which a person may create or use pre-printed accents. There is a wide selection of materials available for such “scrapbooking” activities.
Even though those materials are available, the creator of an accented presentation is still burdened with the same laborious and manual task of assembling accented pages as from centuries ago. This task involves obtaining and fashioning these accents, which may include shopping for appropriate materials and cutting, folding and otherwise fashioning them into the desired accents. For those preparing only a page or two of personal presentation, this is not significant. However, until recently there has not been a way for a creator to efficiently create accents for a presentation having a large number of pages.
The claimed systems and methods relate generally to systems that can produce visual presentations by selections and content made by an end-user, and more particularly to systems that interact with a client device over a network, providing the client device templates and content related to choices made available, and further providing instructions executable by the client device capable of interpreting provided templates and rendering visual representations of a final user-accented presentation in accordance with selections made.